‘Show me what?’

He straightened his shirt, then turned back to face her. ‘I’ll take you to meet her. You can see for yourself why I don’t want my mother anywhere near our wedding.’

* * *

The car came to a stop outside an immaculate two-storey house in a quiet Athenian suburb.

No sooner had the engine been turned off than Christian got out, not bothering to wait for the driver to open the door for him.

The entire drive had been conducted in silence, Christian sitting ramrod-straight, only the whiteness of his knuckles betraying what lay beneath his skin.

It was a demeanour Alessandra had never seen from him before. It unnerved her.

That he’d cancelled his first appointment of the day had unnerved her even more; that, and the grim way he’d said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

deep sense of dread that she followed him out of

short white hair appeared at the door, lines all over her weathered face, her

heel and walked back inside, leaving the

itself was pristine, a strong smell

it. What could have been a beautiful home was nothing

it. She made no show of hiding her disdain for Alessandra, refusing her hand when Christian introduced them, and looking through her when Alessandra said, ‘Hárika ya tin gnorimía,’— ‘pleased to meet you’—a phrase she’d practised with the

the immaculate kitchen, where the stench of bleach was even stronger. No refreshments were

well have been invisible. All of Elena’s attention was on her son. She was speaking harshly to him in quick-fire Greek, whatever she said enough to make the pulse in his jawline throb. When he replied, his answers were short but measured. At one point he seemed to be the one doing the talking rather than the listening, his words making Elena dart her blue eyes to the stranger

all her twenty-five years, Alessandra had never sat in such a poisonous atmosphere as this, or

almost unhinged in Elena Markos’s demeanour. Her eyes were the same blue as Christian’s but were like a frozen winter morning without an

feel as icy as Elena’s eyes. But Christian couldn’t leave it to imaginings. He’d lived it,

any wonder Christian eschewed any form of emotional entanglement when this

Mikolaj’s taverna. She’d said the name Markos stood for guts and determination but had not appreciated then exactly how great his determination must have been, not just to drag himself and his mother out of poverty but to

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